On Twitter, No One Can Hear You Scream

The hashtag was there, plain as day. I know, because I double checked. Triple checked. In a fit of paranoia, I placed the cursor at the end, backspaced until the hashtag was deleted, and RETYPED it. I even had Toby proofread it!

Oh yes. It was there. In all its hashtaggy goodness, Toby-approved.

So I clicked “Tweet”.

Hilarity ensued.

This is offensive! I’ve been a professional proofreader for 20 years. You’re misleading people. The writers I work with would never have a..

It goes on for 5 more tweets.

5 more LOOOOOOOONG tweets. Painstakingly edited to use every last one of the 140 characters allowed.

Five.

Cinco.

Fünf weitere tweets.

A basketball team of tweets, each suffering from Hashtag Blindness.

So I did what any rational person would do. I ran them by my beagle.

I’m nothing, if not tenacious. So I try again.

To create suspense, number your chapters randomly. #HorribleWriteTip

The interwebz was angry that day, my friends.

How you make bestseller?!?

First, I render down some bacon…

Ok, in fairness, I don’t know whether this guy was asking for instructions or insulting me in an English-Is-My-Second-Language sort of way. I assumed the latter, given it was a direct reply to the tweet.

If people listen to you, they’ve got rocks in their head.

Mom, I asked you politely last Thanksgiving to stop trolling my Twitter feed.

Ok, enough about suspense. Maybe they’ll enjoy a tweet about comedy and laughter?

Indicate laughter through snorting and adverbs.

“Hahaha!” Bob snorted mostly surreptitiously. #HorribleWriteTip

No, my friends. They did NOT like a tweet about comedy and laughter.

More lousy advice from a writer who doesn’t know he sucks. 🙁

Wait a minute… Wait a minute…

For the love of all that is holy! Why didn’t someone tell me!?!

Age of Irony

There is no shortage of irony out there, as you can see from the opening graphic of this article (taken from an actual reply).

I added a few new #HorribleWriteTip tweets over the last few months. This was one of the first “new” ones:

Writing urban fantasy? Don’t forget to run your manuscript through Gizoogle before you submit it. #HorribleWriteTip

It didn’t take long to enrage the masses.

Ok, that should read “It didn’t take long to enrage this one guy on Twitter.”

Just another racist cracka spreading stereotypes.

And he was serious about spreading that word, because he started the reply with a period doohickey in front of my handle so everyone could see it.

But props. It’s the first time anyone called me a “racist cracka” on Twitter.

Redemption

The funny thing is that I’m making some headway. The more I tweet these #HorribleWriteTip tweets, the more people jump on the bandwagon. If you do a Twitter search for that hashtag, you’ll actually see someone other than me using it now. 🙂

Here are some of the folks who play along. As always, I remove Twitter handles to protect people’s privacy. I’ll block-quote the original “Horrible” tweets and list the responses after.

When it comes to word count, agents are looking for maximum verbosity. Gives them more to work with. #HorribleWriteTip

“I think you should buy my novel because I write good.”–best way to start a query ever.

Also, everything should symbolize something else. #HorribleWriteTip

Paragraphs are overrated. Let’s play Wall of Text! #HorribleWriteTip

Write every chapter in a different genre, just to show how flexible and diverse you are. #HorribleWriteTip

Don’t forget to stamp the word “Confidential” on every page of your manuscript. An ounce of prevention… #HorribleWriteTip

I prefer either the words WATERMARK or the symbol of a gun w/the words “I’ll shoot you if you tell anyone” in watermark form.

Nat Russo is the Amazon #1 Bestselling Fantasy author of Necromancer Awakening.
Nat was born in New York, raised in Arizona, and has lived just about everywhere in-between. He’s gone from pizza maker, to radio DJ, to Catholic seminarian (in a Benedictine monastery, of all places), to police officer, to software engineer. His career has taken him from central Texas to central Germany, where he worked as a defense contractor for Northrop Grumman. He's spent most of his adult life developing software, playing video games, running a Cub Scout den, gaining/losing/gaining/losing weight, and listening to every kind of music under the sun.
Along the way he managed to earn a degree in Philosophy and a black belt in Tang Soo Do.
He currently makes his home in central Texas with his wife, teenager, mischievous beagle, and goofy boxador.

The scariest thing about all of this is not the intensely baffling word-blindness, but rather the fact that I have ACTUALLY SEEN an author use one of these horrible write tips in their novel. I can’t recall the name now, it’s been many years, but I’ve actually seen a novel where the chapter numbers were out of sync – on purpose! It was extremely confusing.

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Nat Russo is the Amazon #1 Bestselling Fantasy author of Necromancer Awakening.
Nat was born in New York, raised in Arizona, and has lived just about everywhere in-between. He’s gone from pizza maker, to radio DJ, to Catholic seminarian (in a Benedictine monastery, of all places), to police officer, to software engineer. His career has taken him from central Texas to central Germany, where he worked as a defense contractor for Northrop Grumman. He's spent most of his adult life developing software, playing video games, running a Cub Scout den, gaining/losing/gaining/losing weight, and listening to every kind of music under the sun.
Along the way he managed to earn a degree in Philosophy and a black belt in Tang Soo Do.
He currently makes his home in central Texas with his wife, teenager, mischievous beagle, and goofy boxador.